CONICET | Buscador de Institutos y Recursos Humanos

Some of the most fundamental processes in nature are determined by gravity: the expansion of the universe, the formation of stars, the motion of planets, the orbit of the moon and of artificial satellites around the Earth, the fall of rain, the flow of rivers towards the sea, the movement currents and waves, the fall of an apple, the trajectory of a bullet. A surprising number of common calculations in engineering and science include gravity. For most of these Newton?s gravitational constant, g, is sufficient, but for some aspects of environmental science, it is not so much, g, but rather the deviations from it that matter. Newton?s g is the gravitational attraction at the Earth?s surface, for a perfect, spherical Earth with uniform density. The real Earth is much more varied and interesting than that. And to study this Earth, we often need more detailed information. We neeed to know when, where and how the gravity differs from g. We need maps of gravity anomalies. Delivering global gravity maps without the help of satellites is virtually impossible. Even with the painstaking gravity measurements made over almost a century, science only managed to map a few areas in sufficient details. Mathematical models are used to fill in the gaps, but where observations are too sparse, the maps produced by such models may be quite inaccurate. Even with the help of modern satellite technologies providing global maps of sufficient resolution and accurace is a formidable task. This iBook is the story of the most recent and most accurate gravity mission to date - the European Space Agency´s Gravity and steady-state Ocean Circulation Explorer, GOCE. It is also the story of some of the many ways in which scientists have used the GOCE data to improve our understanding in key areas of the ocean, earth and atmospheric sciences.

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